Haiti 2010

Haiti located within the Caribbean Sea is a small island which borders Dominican Republic. It is a country stricken with poverty and is classed as a developing country. The quality of infrastructure is poorly built and the locations of housing is poorly selected (Macleod et al. 2023). In January 2010 Haiti was hit by a magnitude 7 earthquake. The result of the earthquake was a loss of over 200,000 lives and resulted in a cholera epidemic. As a result, $5.4 billion was donated to Haiti and many NGOs became involved within the country. Although this sounds good, and that Haiti would be relieved of its struggles. Ten years on from the event Haiti still struggles to recover from the natural hazard. An issue resulting in the struggle within Haiti is that there was a poor transition between the response stage to the recovery stage of the four sectors stated above. Due to the poor transition, infrastructure was either not adequately built or wasn't built at all. A compounding factor resulting in this poor transition was a decrease in media attention. When the earthquake occurred media attention was extremely high so lots of people saw the news and donated to the aid work. However, as time went on the media attention decreased so less money was donated and therefore the recovery phase didn't have enough money to continue the essential work needed such as the construction (Manilla Arroyo 2014) . This shows that although disaster aid is helpful when there is a lot of media attention, once the media reduces then less money is donated and therefore a country struggles once more in arguably one of the most important stages which is the recovery and mitigation phases. This is because there is an opportunity to build back better through constructing stronger houses and also building in safer areas and not so closely together. Therefore, if another earthquake was to occur the country could be prepared for what was to happen. In turn this would reduce the death toll and reduce the damage caused.